How The Order: 1886 Started With God of War

Ahead of the release of PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886, Ready At Dawn CEO and creative director Ru Weerasuriya revealed that the concept for The Order: 1886 goes back some way, even to the point that their were seeds of what Ready at Dawn wanted to do formed when making their God of War PSP games.

“That’s something we had for a long time,” Weerasuriya told Play when we asked him whether the cinematic feel of The Order: 1886 was particular to the project, or something the studio always wanted to do.

“I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this actually, but the very first time I’d requested and I’d told the team that I wanted to do something different on the cinematic side – this no cinematics, everything had to be running in-game, no more pre-rendered nothing, was on God Of War,” he said.

“On the God of War we made on PSP, I said, ‘guys, we should try and do this’, but it was so hard to do it on PSP at the time in the right way that it didn’t happen,” Weerasuriya explained. “When we tackled The Order, from the very beginning, it was very simple. The rule was, we are not going to have this conversation again – myself, the design director, we were all on the same page, we said this is not up for discussion – this game will not have pre-rendered cinematics. It’s going to run in-game – everything has to. It’s a good thing and in some ways it was a really, really tough task for a lot of people. We put a lot of burden on a lot of people to make this happen.”

Weerasuriya revealed that when Ready At Dawn sat down to discuss the mechanics of the game they wanted to make in 2010, he realised that the concept for The Order: 1886, on which he had first put pen to paper in 2006, was the perfect fit.

“As we were talking about it, I just told the guys, ‘look, I think I have the perfect IP for this, it’s going to be a little bit of let’s see how it works, but with everything we are talking about, I know these things are going to fit really well because of the storyline I have in my head’ and it worked,” Weerasuriya said. “We had three of four IPs that internally we were toying with but this one particularly, I was telling them, ‘hey I think this is going to work’.”